Politics is widely and sometimes rightly seen as a haven for the avaricious, mendacious, and otherwise corrupt. However, we often at least knew who these people were and saw them as electable accordingly. That is, until George Santos came along this year. There is just so much that this man has lied about in his life, from his experience before his election to possibly even his own identity. And yet, voters in New York’s Long Island region voted for him anyway, falling for his electoral scheme, hook, line, and sinker. Fitting expression, considering the regional fishing and boating culture, but that’s beside the point. The point is that this clear-as-day example of a lying sack of s*** is in Congress, and that several lessons need to be learned from this fiasco.

First, some background information is very much in order. There are very few things that can be stated as absolute fact in regards to Santos’ life, but one of them is that he was born to a Brazilian immigrant family in 1988. He then got his GED in New York in 2006, and promptly buzzed off to Brazil. He is alleged to have lived in the country from 2008 to 2011, when Santos likely left to escape a check fraud case against him. He had already confessed his guilt in the case to Brazilian authorities at that time, and yet he fled anyway. Not a great start.

By 2020, Santos seemed to be making a name for himself as a regional director at an alternative investment firm in Florida under the name of George Devolder, taking that surname from his mother’s side of the family. The firm he was working at, Harbor Capital, was accused at this time by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme. Interestingly, the company had previously called Santos “a perfect fit” for them.

After this, he decided to run for Congress, because increasing your profile further is totally the rational thing to do after being implicated in a Ponzi scheme. He won his race, but not without a rap sheet of lies as long as the Island his district is located. In fact, Vanity Fair compiled eleven of his most egregious “alternative facts” (No offense to Kellyanne Conway) about himself, his life, his family, and literally anything else under the Sun. Plenty of grifts, too.

The first of these lies is relatively innocuous compared to the others, and it involves a fictitious men’s volleyball career at a college that he didn’t even attend. The college was Baruch College, where Santos claims to have graduated in 2010 with degrees in economics and finance. Again, he never even attended that college. He also claims to have faced Harvard and Yale in games for the team, as well as stating that he was a star on that team. Baruch is a Division III school, in stark contrast between Yale and Harvard having Division I teams. No way they are facing each other in a serious match, and no way Santos was ever involved in anything with that.

Another, more serious one of these cons was telling the world that his grandparents fled the Holocaust, one of the worst atrocities in modern history. Six million Jews and millions more died in this systematic genocide, and Santos claimed his grandparents were Ukrainian Jews that fled it and changed their names, too. That wasn’t an uncommon series of events for people to take back then, but Santos’ family probably didn’t do that. After all, George Santos’ grandparents were likely born in Brazil, with no sign of Ukrainian or Jewish heritage. Making matters worse, Brazil was a member of the Allies in World War II, fighting against Hitler and certainly not participating in the Holocaust.

The next falsehood was that his mother died of cancer as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Many people who were present at the scene that day did die of cancer caused by inhaling toxic substances while there, but Santos’ mother wasn’t at the Twin Towers at the time of the attacks. In fact, she wasn’t even in America, but she was in Brazil at that time. To put it bluntly, one does not simply forget where their mother is on the day of a nationally traumatic event.

There’s so much else with George Santos, but he is a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a dumpster fire fueled by dishonesty. As a result, there’s not much left to say except that his constituents on Long Island got completely duped, and that the only way to fix this is to give him the boot, possibly to a jail cell. I just want him to go away, and to stop cheapening Congress as an institution. To solve this, I only have one proposal for Congress to act upon…